First 5 installs on fresh desktop install

I’m an avid listener to Linux Unplugged and recently they asked their audience to write in their first five applications installed on a fresh Linux desktop. I’m not much for writing into the show (especially with the Bitcoin Lightning “boost” emphasis), so I figured I can answer that question here.

These are the first five things I install on all my desktops, regardless of the Linux distro.

1. Fish shell

Fish is my preferred shell and I’ve been using it for nearly a decade at this point. I love the auto-completion for command flags, suggestions from my history, and how easy it is to add custom entries to my $PATH. Any system I use the first thing I do is install fish, chsh, logout, and then login an get to work.

2. Syncthingy

Now that I’ve switched away from Nextcloud, I am using Syncthing to keep all my files local between machines and my phone. On the desktop I use Syncthingy flatpak and it just gets the job done. I need this setup right away so I can get to my notes and other bits I need to get a working system.

3. Tilda

There are many terminal apps out there, including a couple great drop down options. I love using Tilda and have been using it forever. It is very lightweight and uses almost no system resources. This is perfect for me as my daily driver is a 10+ year old Dell Precision M4700 with XFCE. I prefer a drop down terminal over having a full window on another workspace or virtual desktop so I can hide it while doing other work, but be a button press away at all times.

Perfection is tilda, tmux, and fish.

4. Vivaldi

Obviously there’s no way to have a desktop nowadays without a browser. I have been using Vivaldi as my primary browser for its power user features and being in (nearly) feature parity between the desktop and mobile versions. I desperately want Firefox to fix their terrible mobile browser. Until then, Vivaldi is my choice.

5. Obsidian

Like most people, I’ve bounced around notes applications more often than I’ve changed distros. A couple years ago I landed on Obsidian and never found a reason to change. I use Syncthing to keep my notes on all my devices (and now I am experimenting with using git to sync them to my self-hosted Forgejo server) and I keep literally everything in it. The critical points for me are that it has first-class markdown support, that the mobile client is just as good as the desktop version, and all my notes are plain .md files I can access with any editor.

I know I’ve mentioned how important the mobile versions of application are a couple of times in this post and that’s because I’m an avid Samsung Dex user. It is crucial my most important apps work well on mobile and when my mobile is is Dex-mode.

The next five…

• tmux
• btop
• distrobox
• Armcord
• virt-manager

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